Say, you liked my Xen introduction article and you are now looking to test its
functionality. But you may be afraid of the long and complex configuration setup, which in the end, might not
yield desirable results. Well, that's a justified concern. Luckily, there's a very simple solution.

You can download and run Xen from a live CD! Based on
Debian 5, it's a demonstration tool that allows users to roadtest Xen in a volatile
live session before deciding whether they want or need Xen. Sounds fantastic. So let's see what this thing can
do.

Live CD tour

Quoting from the official site, the Xen Live CD brings together several features and attempts to show many
different situations, as far as possible, in a clear and functional way. For example, different architectures
of the Hypervisor, pre-configured virtual machines with different kernels of dom0, virtual framebuffer enabled
for virtual work stations, extra examples with SDL console enabled, demonstration of conversion between
machines HVM and PVM, several methods of how to make a virtual hard disk, among many other examples of what can
be done with Xen.

The GRUB menu clearly tells you it's a Debian system. In fact, if you're not into
running Xen, then you have a classic Linux live CD at your disposal, for whatever it's worth.

After a while, the classic Debian desktop will boot, with the Virtual Machine Manager started, and a total of
four virtual machines included, two of them running. This means you should expect some handsome IO activity,
and you'd better have enough RAM for testing the functionality.

Here's an Ubuntu 8.10 machine, with GUI:

Here's Ubuntu server, without GUI:

Working with configurations:

Extras

In fact, you can go so wild with this, that you can create a recursive virtualization loop. For example, you
can boot Xen live CD on top of another virtualization product, like ESXi, then run your virtual machines inside this double encapsulation
container. Wicked.

Conclusion

Well, no grand punchline, except the fact you can explore Xen without having to compile or install
packages, change your boot menu, fiddle with configurations, and other things. In this regard, Xen live CD is a
perfect test tool. Very few other virtualization technologies offer the same level of comfort. Another
candidate is VirtualBox, which is sometimes included with various Linux
distributions.